Storied Companions by Karen Derris

Author:Karen Derris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

All people are indeed our mothers, time and time again. My serious illness makes this Buddhist teaching come alive. According to traditional Theravada Buddhist descriptions of our universe, its central point, Mount Meru, is surrounded by four continents in each of the cardinal directions. Life differs greatly on each of these continents. On Uttarakuru, the northern continent, all babies can be nursed by any grownup, whose fingers are a kind of milk dispenser. When a person encounters a hungry baby, they simply place a finger in the baby’s mouth and milk flows into that suckling. On Uttarakuru, all people can fill the mothering role in this most elemental kind of way. In this imagined land, all people can and do provide the necessary condition for life for any other person, especially those who are the most dependent and helpless. Uttarakuru is a part of our world and yet set apart from us.

In our world, people can’t or don’t care for each other with this kind of attention to need and fluidity of action. While biologically fantastic, this brief description of an imagined place describes a human community of endless relational possibilities. Any person can step into the role of nursing mother and then, I suppose, step out of it. It invites me to envision a boundless human capacity to nurture any other person realized into action. It takes an ethical ideal — all people are our mothers — and then imagines how that might work in embodied practice.

I recently told this story to a woman I sat next to at a fundraising dinner. This cosmological story jumped into my head when she told me she was a dietician for critically ill people. Her work is to make the right mixtures of nutrients that an individual needs for their recovery. She also determines the best pathways to feed her patients: IVs, portals, feeding tubes, etc.

I hesitated before telling this story of the world from another time and culture to someone I’d just met. Maybe it’s too strange and she would look around for another place to sit? However, that wasn’t her reaction; not at all. She stepped right into this brief story, and her eyes filled with tears. She saw herself as filling this role. “This is a lot like what I do,” she told me, confirming the connection I saw between her professional actions and those in the story. We were two grown, independent, accomplished women, and we were strangers. In this shared moment we each found our place in this vision of a world of ever-present care. Perhaps she had never thought of her work from that broader perspective; I hadn’t really seen the connections between this story and the many ways people are acting out its ethic in the world around us.

This brief, serendipitous conversation inspired me to move around inside this story. My impulse is to place myself into it as the person with something to give in order to nurture a person in need. Just a

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